Da Vinci novel breaks code for success

A group of statisticians has laboured for months to crack the secret of producing best selling novels - only to find that under their formula The Da Vinci Code should have been a flop.

This year's runaway bestseller should have had only a 36% chance of reaching the charts, according to Atai Winkler and his team. Their model fits work by some topselling authors but gives only middling marks to the Harry Potter titles and rules out almost everything by Charles Dickens except for his lesser-known Christmas story The Battle of Life.

However, Dr Winkler, a former academic at Middlesex University who works intensively for large companies, says he does not think the method is a turkey. It was developed to help customers of the UK wing of the self-publishing website Lulu.com hone their books for the market. It assumes that much of success lies in the title. The team of three statisticians, helped by programmers, studied 54 years of fiction number ones in the New York Times and the 100 favourite novels in the BBC's Big Read poll.

Comparing these with a control group of less successful novels by the same authors, they found that the winning books had three common features; they had metaphorical, or figurative titles instead of literal ones; the first word was a pronoun, a verb, an adjective or a greeting; and their grammar patterns took the form either of a possessive case with a noun, or of an adjective and noun or of the words The ... of ...

By this formula the most perfect titles were Agatha Christies' last thriller Sleeping Murder (1976) and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, both with 83% marks. The poorest was Patricia Cornwell's thriller Cause of Death, with 9%.

British authors produced the highest-scoring titles in both studies. John Le Carre was the most consistent with Smiley's People, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, the Tailor of Panama and others.

Dr Winkler said: "When we tested our model on 700 titles published over 50 years, it correctly predicted whether a book was a bestseller or not for nearly 70% of cases. This is 40% better than random guesswork. It is far from perfect but given the nature of the data and the way tastes change 70% accuracy is surprisingly good."

Yet the Harry Potter books score only 51% because their titles count as literal, though with correct grammar patterns. The Da Vinci Code is written off for being literal, as is Catch-22 and Dickens' Bleak House and a number of others.

Dan Brown however, can take heart. The Lulu team predicts he will have a real bestseller next year with The Solomon Key. Though its title structure is identical to The Da Vinci Code, they count it as figurative "due to its reference to the Greater and Lesser Keys of Solomon, medieval books about black magic".